Mathematical models play an important role in simulating the world-wide COVID-19 epidemic. Together with colleagues from various institutions around Vienna, members of the biomathematics and probability groups of the Faculty of Mathematics of the University of Vienna have constructed a web application to present two standard approaches of mathematical epidemiology and to discuss their assumptions, scope and limits: an SEIR (susceptible - exposed - infectious - removed) ODE compartment model and a so-called Nowcasting model for the estimation of the reproduction number R.

The webpage contains an interactive tool to simulate the spread of the disease and an estimation app, which are both applied to the (daily updated) Austrian case data. The goal of the project is not to predict the course of the epidemic in Austria, but to provide insight into some key epidemiological methods, in a way that is accessible to an (interested) lay audience.